Tuesday, August 19, 2014

I originally posted this as a comment on the hal2020.com blog, but I think it is important enough that I posted it here too.
From http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/#comment-14856:
"I agree, but I do have several items on my wishlist for Satya, including
ending the Yahoo-Bing and the MS-Novell deal, ending the Android patent
attacks, putting an end to the SCO lawsuit,"
From http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/#comment-14918:
"For example, the MS-Novell deal is so bad that FSF put a provision in
GPLv3 against it. I don’t know how much power MS has right now to end
the SCO lawsuit, but it was quite famous. So is the FAT/exFAT patents
and how it has been used to attack Android and other things that uses
them (I am thinking that existing patents should go to the public domain
and any remaining exFAT patent applications withdrawn from USPTO if
possible)."
If you don't remember, the patent part of the Microsoft-Novell deal was discriminatory, which means that it was limited to specific customers. The point of free software, including licenses like the GPL, is that it allows free distribution of software without any royalty based patent licensing requirements. This is why the GPLv3 had a provision against it. Another problem is the $100 million worth of vouchers, to get customers to buy SUSE. Why should MS help a competitor like this? This deal was renewed in 2011 for four years, and it still have the same problems. Since then Novell has abandoned Mono, making the deal less valuable for MS than it was before.
Also, the FAT patents are not the only patents MS used to attack Android, and ChromeOS is also attacked using similar patents. Most of these patent attacks are based on FUD.
From http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/#comment-14919:
"And I forgot to mention OOXML. I just realized that Office for Windows
don’t use the “Open XML” term that much inside the software. I am
thinking of a proposal where the standard would be withdrawn from ISO,
the “Office Open XML” term would be depreciated, and the “Strict Open
XML” option would be removed (I doubt it is catching on). Note this
don’t change the file format itself in anyway, the contents of the ISO
standard would be merged with MS-DOCX/XLSX/PPTX."